Tebas wrote on X that Real Madrid’s executive “has an orchestra of mouthpieces and Real Madrid leads the way,” before adding that the club’s communication script “reminds one of the propaganda techniques that Goebbels used.”
“The comparison is with the techniques, not with the ideology or, of course, with Madrid fans,” he wrote, in a clarification tacked onto the same post.
Real Madrid responded on Friday with a formal demand that Tebas resign from his two institutional posts: La Liga president and vice-president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation (RFEF). The club called the invocation of Nazi propaganda “absolutely intolerable and extraordinarily serious,” and “deeply offensive, morally repugnant, and institutionally unworthy.”
“Javier Tebas’s repeated conduct demonstrates a lack of neutrality, respect, and impartiality incompatible with his institutional responsibilities,” the club said. “His constant attacks on Real Madrid and those demanding transparency and regeneration represent, in our club’s view, a genuine scourge for Spanish football.”
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Rodríguez Uribes calls comparison unacceptable
Spain’s Higher Sports Council, or Consejo Superior de Deportes (CSD), is the state body that oversees Spanish sport. By Saturday, its president José Manuel Rodríguez Uribes had said Tebas should retract and apologise.
“It’s unacceptable. You can’t use the Nazis or Goebbels as a point of comparison,” Rodríguez Uribes said.
“It’s completely out of order, and I think Tebas should apologise.”
The CSD president added that his council’s legal department was now examining whether Tebas had breached the institutional duties of his office, while noting that any formal disciplinary ruling was not his to take.
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Tebas refuses to apologise
Rather than withdraw the comparison, Tebas replied to Rodríguez Uribes directly. He insisted “the comparison relates to those propaganda methods, and not to an ideology, and certainly not to Real Madrid’s supporters,” and listed Spanish government ministers and parliamentary spokespeople he said had made similar Goebbels references without ever being asked to retract.
“From the president of the Higher Sports Council, one expects accuracy, impartiality and consistency,” he wrote.
Disqualification is one of the TAD’s options
The question now sitting with the CSD’s legal team is whether to pass the file to Spain’s Sports Administrative Tribunal, the TAD, the body that rules on disciplinary cases against sports officials and has the power to disqualify a league president from office. Sanctions at that end of the scale would run from a formal warning up to a ban measured in months.
No case has been opened. Tebas remains in post, with Real Madrid demanding his removal and the CSD still weighing whether his Goebbels comparison crossed from free speech into a disciplinary infraction.
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